Everyone's born with their soulmate's first words to them written on their skin, and that should make things easy, but it really doesn't. "Roy has alternatively despised his mark and clung to it like a lifeline. Colonel. Just one word, right at the back of his foot. His literal Achilles’ heel."

Maria can’t recall the last time she slept.

Edgar has wanted to be a member of the Choir since he first learned of its existence, and he finds himself inducted into its ranks in the most unusual of ceremonies.

Padme lives. She runs. -- Leia is growing in fits and spurts, eating greedily and crying loudly. She stays in a sling on Padme’s chest when they move, Luke held snug in a sling around Obi Wan’s. Luke gets a whole head of thick brown hair while Leia’s is still patchy and bald, but he never matches his sister’s powerful lungs. When Padme had been sitting in her high senatorial apartment on Corsucant, holding Anakin’s sweaty hand, she had never imagined she’d be murmuring desperately soothing noises to her fussy daughter while she shot around a corner at stormtroopers, while R2D2 meddles with a ship’s blast doors behind her. Luke starts teething on a hot jungle planet where they hunker down for three weeks, sleeping in an abandoned old temple and catching the local wildlife for dinner. Leia takes her first steps in the belly of a Corellian freighter they’ve stowed away on. She wobbles between Padme’s outstretched hands and Obi Wan’s knees and boxes of smuggled luxuries. When she falls down, Obi Wan surges forward, heart in his throat, but Leia laughs.

Anakin wasn’t sure how to ask, so he didn't. Instead, he waited until Master Kenobi fell asleep and stayed up to tinker in the dark, building his own scanner out of parts stolen from the trash. The chip was in his right thigh.

“Guess it is true what they say,” Boil mutters behind him. “The Grey Wardens really will take anyone.” Despite his red-rimmed eyes, Fives grins. “Looks like the set up to a punchline. If two mages and an elf walk into a tavern…” - When the battle of Ostagar goes sour, Cody grabs what brothers he can and escapes into the Wilds. Trouble of an unexpected sort is waiting for them there.